Rating: 
Summary: Cool O'Reilly book!
Review: Somewhere between a reference and a tutorial, this book REALLY hits it's mark. Those looking for a pure tutorial will probably want something shorter. Those who have to finish their final project in three weeks and have no time for light reading and want serious help will want this book by their side day and (in my case) night!
Rating:
Summary: Great annotated reference.
Review: There are many types of computer book. If you are inexperienced, or don't know the background, then a tutorial is best. This isn't a tutorial, more in the "Nutshell" tradition of O'Reilly - ie what I'd call an "Annotated Reference", giving both building-brick examples and concise explanations of the technology alongside a full technical reference. For a tutorial, it'd deserve no more than 2 stars, but as a desktop reference for those who are confident of their Java/GUI skills, it is a great reference - 5 stars. Overall though, as a second Swing book for those less sure of themselves, and doubling as an annotated reference for the more advanced: 4 stars overall, as it doesn't give you the background a full tutorial would.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs follow up
Review: Just as there's "Java Examples in a Nutshell" (the Alligator book), there needs to be a "Swing Examples in a Nutshell."
Rating: 
Summary: To much paper
Review: The book is nothing more than a rush job, spreading out the swing API over too much paper.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyed It!
Review: This book helps with some much needed information about Swing, complete with simple easy to understand examples. I'm psyched! Finally a world class alternative to the microsoft libraries. and in Java!
Rating:
Summary: It fills in the blanks...
Review: This is an excellent book. I am impressed by how complete swing is documented. I did not find this book to be a mere dump of the API. It does have many references to the different packages and classes and their methods and properties. But it explains these in detail and in the context of a chapter's subject. The chapters on swing.text provide the reader a solid understanding of a very complex and poorly documented package. Big thumbs up!
Rating: 
Summary: An overview of Java Swing
Review: We wrote Java Swing with two primary goals in mind. On one hand, we wanted to provide a complete reference to the swing API. On the other hand, we wanted to go much deeper and provide our readers with lots of useful examples and detailed explanations. After all, if all you're getting is list of methods, you might as well just bring up the Javadoc.We went after our first goal with full force. Every class and interface in the core swing packages (javax.swing, javax.accessibility, javax.swing.border, javax.swing.colorchooser, javax.swing.event, javax.swing.filechooser, javax.swing.table, javax.swing.text (we also discuss the html and rtf packages) javax.swing.tree, and javax.swing.undo) is explained. In the discussion of these classes and interfaces, we describe each and every public or protected constructor, method and field. You'll find that the method descriptions given in Java Swing go far beyond the often limited documentation available in the Swing JavaDoc. To make the book easier to use, methods conforming to JavaBeans accessor naming conventions are shown in a convenient table format, giving you a quick reference for all of the properties of a given class. In addition to describing all of the constructors, methods, and fields, we've also included class diagrams for each component, showing how the component interacts with other classes. Due to the complexity of Swing, these diagrams not only show where the classes fit in the inheritance hierarchy, but also how they relate to other classes such as the Swing models. If we'd stopped there, Java Swing would be a convenient reference, but little more. Enter goal #2. The majority of the book is divided along component boundaries. The first chapter provides a general overview of Swing, the next chapter tells you how to get started, and Chapter 3 discusses the many things brought to the table by the JComponent base class. After that, we get into the various components, broken down into chapters as follows: Icons & Labels, Buttons, Bounded Range Components, Lists & Combo Boxes, Containers, Internal Frames, Dialogs, Specialty Panes (JScrollPane, JSplitPane, JTabbedPane) and Layout Managers, Choosers (FileChooser and ColorChooser), Borders, Menus & Toolbars, Tables (2 chapters, the second of which contains nothing but three advanced examples), Trees, Undo, Text (6 chapters, starting with a general introduction and advancing through the entire text framework), Accessibility, Look and Feel, and Utilities (SwingUtilities, Timer, EventListenerList, etc.). We finish the book with an "under the hood" chapter that explores some of the more esoteric aspects of swing, including information on building your own components, managing focus, issues with heavyweight components, multi-threading in Swing, and Swing painting. Each of these chapters contains descriptions of how the components work and how they fit together with their supporting classes (such as models). Along with the detailed API descriptions we mentioned earlier, you'll find numerous examples that show you not just how to create the components and set a few properties, but how to go beyond the obvious and begin to take full advantage of the many features Swing provides. Here are just a few of the interesting examples you'll find in Java Swing: DynamicIcon: An implementation of the Icon interface that renders a different image each time it's painted based on the state of some other object. List & ComboBox Renderers: Examples that show how to mix text and graphics into the JList and JComboBox components. ExitFrame: A reusable extension of JFrame that you can use to cause your application to exit the VM when the user closes the main frame. Splash: Shows how you can use a JWindow to create an application start-up "splash" screen. SampleDesktop: A detailed JDesktopPane/JInternalFrame example that shows you how to do a variety of interesting things including frame tiling, restricting frame movement (keeping frames from being moved off of the screen), and displaying a background desktop image. DialogDesktop: Shows how you can use internal dialog boxes, even if you weren't planning on using a desktop pane in your application. This chapter (which covers JDialog and JOptionPane) also includes a full-page table that makes it easy to understand that dozens of static methods you can call to create JOptionPane dialogs. AudioAccessory: A JFileChooser accessory class that plays audio files as they are selected in a file chooser. ThumbNailFileView: Another JFileChooser example. This one shows how you can extend the FileView class to show a tiny versions of GIF or JPEG files as the icons that precede the file names. FontChooser: A component that uses JColorChooser along with several other Swing components to build a full-featured font chooser that displays text using the select font and color. Menu Example: A sample menu that shows you how to use all of the special features provided by Swing menus including mnemonics, accelerators, icons, separators, check box menu items, radio button menu items, and submenus. Stock Market Table: Shows how to implement a custom table model that tracks the stock market, updating the JTable as price changes occur. QueryTableModel: A table model that manages the results of SQL queries, changing dynamically to support each arbitrary new query. Volume Renderer & Editor: Table cell renderers and editors that use JScrollBars to display and edit the value of an integer property. More table examples: Chapter 16 is an example-only chapter that includes the following: a table that supports row headers, a table that handles very large quantities of data by introducing table "paging", and a table model that simultaneously provides data for a JTable and a custom pie-chart component. Expression Tree: A series of detailed examples that use tree cell editors and renderers to display the results of simple mathematical expressions using the JTree component. Undoable Toggle Buttons: A series of examples that explore the various classes in the undo package by adding undo support to JToggleButton. Text Field Sizing: A detailed example that shows how to get your JTextFields to be just the size you want them to be. FixedLengthDocument: A document model implementation that restricts text to an arbitrary maximum length. This is part of a discussion of the proper strategy to be used to filter text input in Swing. XORCaret: A custom Caret implementation that replaces the vertical bar cursor with a dynamically sized "xor" caret. Stylized Editor: A lengthy example that shows how to build a text editor with full support for named paragraph styles. Editor Kits: A series of examples that show how to take advantage of the default actions defined by the Swing editor kits to create editors with keyboard, menu and toolbar access to functionality such as cut/copy/paste and font style changing. PlainLookAndFeel: As part of 75 pages of examination of Swing's L&F architecture, we begin the development of a custom L&F, including a complete implementation of a custom UI delegate for the JSlider class. JogShuttle: A custom component built from scratch using the standard Swing architecture. This example shows how to build your own components using models and UI delegates. These are just some of the many, many examples that lead us to claim that Java Swing is much more than an API dump. If you're looking for a complete Swing reference, Java Swing is definitely the book for you. But if you want more, including detailed discussions of how all the pieces fit together, plus dozens of interesting, non-trivial examples, you've still come to the right place.
Rating:
Summary: Exactly what I waslooking for
Review: I had been waiting for this book for months. When it finally came I was completely happy with its contents and structure. It lives up to the standards that I have come to expect from O'reilly. Before this book came out, I had to read the source code to find out what was going on.
Rating:
Summary: Not the tutorial I was looking for.
Review: This is one of the few O'Reilly books I have been disappointed with. It is pretty much just a hard copy of the API with comments. However some of the examples were quite useful. Unfortunately this book just doesn't compare to some of the other Swing books out there.
Rating:
Summary: Very Thorough
Review: This is a solid book. It really saved my rear over the past week. I'm very impressed with some of the new Swing classes from JavaSoft. My only regret is that there are some errors in the index of this book, which takes me longer to find the material I need. But other than that, this is one of the better buys.
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